Following the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), tongzhi was used to mean "comrade" in a communist sense: it was used to address almost everyone, male and female, young and old.
In recent years, however, this meaning of the term has fallen out of common usage, except within Chinese Communist Party (CCP) discourse and among people of older generations.
The committee reasoned that these terms are known to be used in private enterprises or mafia circles, and thus are "influences of bureaucratism and sectarianism" which "blemish[es] the party and government's image".
[8][9] This use of the term was first adopted by Michael Lam, a columnist for the Hong Kong-based City Magazine, and was popularized by the inaugural Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 1989, whose aim was to present same-sex relationships as positive and suggesting solidarity between LGBT people, while also providing an indigenous term to describe same-sex love.
According to Chou Wah-shan, tongzhi is a fluid term that can refer to any person who is not heteronormative, as well as a means of signifying "politics beyond the homo-hetero duality" and "integrating the sexual into the social".